Hi all,
I want to get some discussion going and clarification about the future
direction of the touchscreen interface in Rockbox. The current situation
is rather unsatisfactory:
- the user has a choice of two modes: "3x3 grid" or "absolute" (ie. real
touch mode) in menus and WPS
- many screens have not yet been adapted to "absolute" mode
- some of those screens temporarily switch the user to grid mode (with
no warning), whereas others don't even do that and are unusable in
absolute mode
- the default WPS is not set up for absolute mode (at least on the D2,
since the 320x240 Cabbiev2 is shared with other targets)
- many plugins currently switch to grid mode, even while in their menus
(horrible behaviour if the user has chosen to use absolute mode in menus).
Work is going on to provide "real" touchscreen versions of some screens
(eg. the EQ screen - FS#10639) but this raises an interesting question.
The most intuitive "real touch" implementation of this screen (and I'm
sure others too) is sufficiently different to the existing one that it
can't be used in grid mode.
The question is, does Rockbox as a project want to maintain "grid
mode"? Even if this potentially means compromising future "real touch"
versions of these screens? I'm imagining scenarios of the existing
screens being if()'d and #ifdef'd to hell and beyond if we want to
achieve this.
I'm firmly of the opinion that "grid mode" was only ever a stop-gap
measure, and in the long run the user-visible option should be removed -
though the API should still exist for special cases such as those
plugins where absolute mode makes no sense. All other screens should be
adapted to use absolute mode.
What do others think?
Rob.
